Marilyn Hacker Boeken

This critically acclaimed sonnet sequence is the passionately intense story of a love affair between two women, from the electricity of their first acquaintance to the experience of their parting.

“Hacker is, to use a trite term, a major poet. More than that she is exciting and true.”―George Szirtes In Names , Marilyn Hacker juxtaposes glimpses of contemporary lives with dialogues undertaken in signal poetic voices. Using her signature wit, passion, and mastery of received and invented forms, she convinces us to believe in a world made possible by language―prescient, playful, polyglot, and often breathtaking.from “Ghazal: The Beloved”:Lines that grapple doubt, written because of the beloved:when grief subsides, what survives the loss of the beloved?Your every declaration is suspect.That was, at least, the departing gloss of the beloved.Were you merely a servant of the stateor (now you give the coin a toss) of the beloved?How pure you were, resistant in an orchard.Peace with justice: the cause of the beloved.

Marilyn Hacker's voice is unique in its intelligence, urbanity, its deployment of an elegiac humor, its weaving of literary sources into the fabric and vocabulary of ordinary life, its archaeology of memory. <i>Desesperanto</i> refines the themes of loss, exile, and return that have consistently informed her work. The title itself is a wordplay combining the Spanish word esperanto, signifying "hope," and the French <i>desespoir</i>, meaning "to lose heart." <i>Des-esperanto</i>, then, is a universal language of despair —despair of the possibility of a universal language. As always in Hacker's poetry, prosodic measure is a catalyst for profound feeling and accurate thought, and she employs it with a wit and brio that at once stem from and counteract despair. Guillaume Apollinaire, June Jordan, and Joseph Roth are among this book's tutelary spirits, to whom the poet pays homage as she confronts a new, dangerous century.